February 2017: Blog Net Income Report

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I have been watching many people around the blogosphere disclose their monthly online income, and quite honestly, I thought it would be a good idea to do the same. I am not disclosing any income from my day job as a Corporate Finance Manager. Instead, this will serve as a marker for the additional earnings I achieve as a result of my online endeavors and various side gigs.

Please understand that I am not disclosing this to make anyone jealous, only to serve as a very visual and tangible reminder that any of you reading this can achieve the same results…probably better even!

Category Explanations:

Advertising Sales: These are direct advertisements from various media companies. I have several sites which I own and have sectioned off that amount that I earn from those. I also place ads for clients of mine as well. These are other bloggers that I find advertising for, in which I keep a small percentage of the earnings for myself.

AdSense/Clickable Ads: These are the earnings I get from all of those banners you see spread throughout sites…they could be on the sidebar or even within the article itself. I actually keep the ads hidden and the only people that see them are the ones that find me through a search engine like Google or Yahoo. This way my more loyal readers aren’t bothered by the additional clutter and noise. This is an area I am always looking to increase.

Affiliate Earnings: These are the earnings you receive from selling other peoples (or your own) products on your website. Think of major players like Amazon Affiliates. If you put up their affiliate links people can buy items from Amazon from your site directly, which in turn earns you a portion of that revenue.

Misc Earnings: There will be always miscellaneous ways of earning income and racking up expenses! This misc. buckets is a collection of many items, some are recurring while others are one-off items. I might write an article for a major site and get paid $50 to do so. Or perhaps I help someone with organic link building. I also offer some minimal paid services for blog coaching and helping others start blogs…this earns me some additional income, but I haven’t widely publicized and advertised it to really grow that part of the business yet.

Summary and Conclusion

I earned just over $24,000 this month! This year is starting out stronger than the last, and I see it continuing for the foreseeable future. The downfall is that this month I had nearly $11,000 in expenses. With my top line revenue at over $35,000 I usually have a better profit margin and would keep significantly more of that money. However… this month I had my annual website maintenance renewal which is almost $10,000 and is based on the number of sites I own, which continues to grow!

The good news is that with a good chunk of expenses out of the way for the rest of the year, I should be able to increase my margins each month for the rest of 2017. Most of increase in income is coming via two streams: 1) I am buying up more sites! I bought two new sites last month, which the prices and names aren’t disclosed in this report since it is outside of my normal operating income. Also, I’m in the process of buying one or two more this month as well. 2) Customer outreach!! I said it last month, and I will repeat it again, I’m getting in front of new customers and companies, and pitching my services to them. They are almost always satisfied with my services and it leads to a built-in customer base that continues to increase.

If you are interested in earning online income, and making $200,000 blogging, trust me it can be done! I’m telling you, the internet has opened up possibilities that used to be non-existent. If I can start a website and earn money, then literally everyone else in the world can too! You just need to have a little patience, and a little persistence. If you’re inspired, I included a banner below for BlueHost, this was the Hosting company that I started with as well. They help you setup your site for free, and are one of the cheapest and more reliable hosting companies in the game!

When you say direct advertising sales do you just mean that you contact advertisers on behalf of other websites and then take a % of those sales if and when they agree to advertise?

Thanks!

I’ve looked at your previous income reports and it looks like your income has been pretty steady in the 20-40k per month area. Have you been doing much to try and increase it or are you happy with where you’re currently at?